Oracle is notorious for its licensing. The company is very unclear about how their software needs to be correctly licensed. This leaves room for multiple interpretations. And Oracle takes advantage of that in many cases by claiming the customer did not license Oracle software in the correct way. Part of their business model is to get additional income from claims.

Many customers are ignorant, are afraid for court cases, do not want the hassle and settle the claim.

Recently Oracle Germany announced that all CPU’s in all ESXi hosts in multiple clusters managed by the same vCenter Server need to be licensed for Oracle. The reason for this change is that with the introduction of vSphere 5.1, virtual machines can be vMotioned to other clusters.

So before vSphere 5.1 , Oracle claimed customers needed to license all CPU’s of the VMware cluster. Even when Oracle VM’s never run on all of that cluster hosts.